They Don't Want to Talk About It

Everything but the Girl formed in Hull, Yorkshire, in 1982, Yo La
Tengo in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1984. Both began as resolutely indie
male-female duos, and although the British band proved more resolute
about the duo part and the Americans about the indie part, both also
proved living entities ready to adapt. EBTG toured with hired sidemen
in the high-flying '80s and owed most of their considerable '90s
success to interventions by dance titans Massive Attack and Todd
Terry; YLT signed with Matador immediately after Matador signed with
Atlantic in 1991 only to find Atlantic forcing them to ditch a drolly
self-mocking video in favor of a lip-synched mediocrity MTV didn't
play anyway. But the best evidence of their vitality is that both
male-female duos began as couples and remain so three decades
later. Two entertaining and informative books, the Tracey Thorn memoir
Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star
and the Jesse Jarnow biography Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the
Rise of Indie Rock, seemed an excellent excuse to ponder this
confluence. What I should have guessed was that I'd end up pondering
indie rock U.K.- and U.S.-style just as much.

Big Day Coming's subtitle tells it like it is. Yes, it's a
band bio, providing detail aplenty about not just founders Ira Kaplan
and Georgia Hubley but James McNew, the bassist the pair finally got
right after 15 tries. But it's also a history. Certain that Jarnow
gets random details wrong because he botches some of my own dates, I'm
just as certain of how skillfully he sketches in a bunch of characters
I've rubbed shoulders with while tracing "the Rise of Indie Rock" and
integrates two perilous digressions along the way. Baseball in
19th-century Hoboken, where the national pastime was formalized, and
Georgia's filmmaker parents John and Faith Hubley, who led unlike and
unlikely lives before plighting their unconventional troth, are the
kind of research seams that lead writers astray, but Jarnow turns
baseball into a metaphor for both escape-from-Manhattan and the
corporatization of "alternative" and the Hubleys' bustling menage into
a precedent for Georgia and Ira's own marriage.

What he doesn't do is explore the marriage itself. Without once
doubting the depth of their love and commitment, one gathers that it's
been slightly more tempestuous than their companionable onstage
unpredictability suggests. That's about it for inside dope. Hubley and
Kaplan are so private about their relationship that when I wangled my
way into their modest Hoboken condo in 2003 it counted as a
scoop--which Jarnow quotes, suggesting that he never gained such
access himself. And why should he have? As Thorn points out, the
"archetypal" Taylor and Burton displayed their passion for all to see,
and how'd that work out?

For her part, Thorn reports that she and Ben Watt have "never
succeeded in conveying to the media any sense of what we're really
like." Although Bedsit Disco Queen was written in fits and
starts and ends for no good reason in 2007, it's a gem by the wretched
standard of the rock memoir, and also by the stiff-necked standard of
theses on Beckett's fiction, another literary genre Thorn has under
her belt. Warmly detailed on her girlhood and a sane if tragically
outdated guide to how to be a sane pop star, Thorn's book is
plainspoken in the manner of the lyrics that dot it and spiky in the
manner of a feminist who wrote a thesis on Beckett's fiction. But
almost all it has to say about her union with her life partner comes
in five pages right after the tale of Watt's near-death from an
obscure immune disorder in 1992. As it happens, this ordeal, which
left him unable to digest fiber or fat, inspired its own book, the
lamentably out-of-print 1996 memoir Patient, which achieves a
literary intensity and formal coherence equaled by few rock memoirs
ever. Then again, it's not a rock memoir. Agonizing, mordant,
dreamlike, and matter-of-fact, suspenseful even though you know its
author won't die, it's among other things a love story about Tracey
sitting at his bedside and beckoning him from the end of the
rainbow--a highly oblique one.

If we end up learning not much about these romantic partnerships,
well, even low-wattage celebrity marriages seldom parallel our own,
and good marriages are so different from each other that their
educational value for anyone else is decidedly hit-or-miss. Thorn's
word to the wed is marriage manual stuff: "[P]erhaps the only secret
of success in any relationship is to agree to differ." I don't blame
her for the banality of this advisory--in marriage advice, banality is
coin of the realm. But I would point out that, near as we can tell,
it's not the way Georgia and Ira do things. They appear to be
dedicated sharers, with walking encyclopedia of musical trifles Kaplan
the prime mover. Kaplan often and Hubley occasionally will perform
solo or moonlight with other acts, and if they live long enough
they'll probably pack the band in; some believe their quiet new
Fade does just that, although I'd wager all options are
open. But it's hard to imagine them pursuing solo careers, as Thorn
and Watt have since EBTG last recorded in 1998, without taking their
lives solo too.

Or maybe there is something to learn--from the art, not the
memoirs. When you strain to decipher their signature murmur, Yo La
Tengo's lyrics hint at connubial shyness and withdrawal, plus related
stuff more punitive on Georgia's part and more self-involved on
Ira's. But they don't always depict "themselves" as so
withdrawn. Jarnow cites lines worth repeating from 2000's And Then
Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Georgia: "Although you don't
believe me you are strong / Darkness always turns into the dawn / And
you won't even remember this for long / When it ends all right." Ira:
"You say that all we do is fight and I think to myself, gee, I don't
know that that's true." Which aren't so far from such post-ordeal
Thorn lyrics as "And I bet you could tell me / How slowly four follows
three / And you're most forlorn just before the dawn" and "I know it's
hard, yeah, I know it's hard / And, baby, that's something I don't
disregard / But with your troubled mind / You're like a goods train
running through my life." Though Thorn's lyrics had their intimate
passages before Watt's illness and their objective ones after, early
on she was more programmatic, often in an explicitly feminist way:
"You see, me and Bobby D don't get along that easily / You told the
world, 'Skip rules, have fun' / Knocked her from here to kingdom
come."

I put "themselves" in quotation marks above because I try,
imperfectly, never to assume that a song in the first person is
autobiographical. Autobiographically inspired, fine--Thorn wouldn't
close her chapters with a lyric otherwise. But songs are built to be
knocked off their documentary moorings by formal demands and genre
expectations. So if we're sussing these duos' meanings, we need to
understand where they're coming from aesthetically--which
geographically and culturally is very different places. In 1981
Soho Weekly News columnist Kaplan covered the London debut of
Hoboken's jumpy, innocuous Bongos, who were slammed in NME, he
reported, for calling themselves "rock 'n' roll": "The term is
currently out of vogue in English new wave circles because it conjures
up overbearing macho attitudes." This was the first wave of the U.K.'s
ridiculous anti-"rockism" campaign, and although Thorn does gently
mock her own ideological rigor in retrospect, she was on the front
lines. Hence her disdain for Bobby D, who while indeed wide open to
sexism charges--I very much like the lyric I quoted--was and remains
kind of a humane artist even so. And hence as well her strange, shaky
niche in the pop world where she half-accidentally situated
herself.

I am an Everything but the Girl agnostic--I've never disliked them
or worked up any interest either. Having read their books and listened
again I respect them more actively than I used to. But as Thorn says,
she has "a voice which inspires reverence in certain listeners, and
yet about which I have so many reservations." I'm with her, not her
listeners. But I can certainly feel how many women would hear their
unpretty principles in her, and many men identify or empathize. I find
her more relatable than Sade myself--psychologically,
anyway. Aurally's a tougher question, though one might well resent the
way Sade gets more love for having more voice and saying less with
it. This matters because, Thorn to the contrary, EBTG's "pop" clearly
made its way in life as alt-Sade. They're more varied and less smooth
than Sade due to questing music man Watt, and more ambitious lyrically
because Thorn is a literary feminist who keeps herself to
herself--even when she writes as an "I" who endures painful levels of
neglect and abuse and occasionally assumes the voice of the mother
Thorn wouldn't become until 1998.

Note, however, that although EBTG sold quite a few albums in the
'80s, only two of their singles went top 50 until 1988. That's when
they scored their big hit cover of Rod Stewart's "I Don't Want to Talk
About It," written by Danny Whitten, the Crazy Horse guitarist whose
heroin OD helped inspire Neil Young's Tonight's the Night--that
is, by an archetypal rockist. Thorn says she likes America--until the
1995 "Missing" remix by New Yorker Todd Terry that became the band's
biggest hit, she always knew her fans here had made an effort to get
to her. But with an insularity that's all too typical of mid-level
British musicians, and that speaks poorly of the sophistication she
prizes, she doesn't seem to know much about the place.

The Kinks-worshipping Hoboken stalwarts are more
ecumenical. Starting vaguely folk-rocky because that was all they had
the chops for, Yo La Tengo--long such a shoestring operation that the
founding couple made their nut copyediting until 1992--gained an
audience on the Continent well before they dented the mother country,
although pop polymath Kaplan (which of course includes "rock 'n' roll"
polymath) formed prescient bonds with My Bloody Valentine's Kevin
Shields and Spacemen 3's Sonic Boom. They eventually mastered Neil
Young guitar freakouts no more "rockist" than the Bongos' polyrhythms
as well as the background music Thorn indignantly and inaccurately
claims EBTG had nothing to do with, developed relationships with the
Sun Ra Arkestra as well as a country-jazzy Nashville aggregation
called Lambchop I personally can't stand.

Everything but the Girl had peaked and subsided three times by the
time it began to seem possible that Yo La Tengo were one of the best
bands in America--in fact, the world. Never literally pop--Jarnow
trumpets Yo La's jokey boast about their version of Sun Ra's "Nuclear
War" going top 10 on Billboard's singles sales chart without
mentioning that sales are not how singles popularity is measured--they
make their pretty good living the way commercially marginal bands do:
touring, record sales, film work, licensing, commercials, merch,
whatever. Spiritually, however, they are pop--an enormous repertoire
of catchy cover tunes you may remember and may not has been a hallmark
since the beginning, complemented now by a sizable cache of originals
you always remember and probably can't name. Older by a few years than
EBTG, though you wouldn't think it to look at them, they have no
children where the English couple have three, and as Hubley told a
reporter who asked why: "That's none of your business. My mother
doesn't even know the answer to that question." No doubt this is part
of the reason they maintain such a youthful and even childlike
demeanor. But the other is that they're more playful by nature than
Thorn and Watt. Their marriage seems like more fun, and probably would
even if they'd put in time mastering the stroller mambo.

Two memoirs and a biography later, I'm not floating any theories
about the real-life interactions of either couple. Nor am I suggesting
that some inside doper or other couldn't help me do so. But these
books choose instead to point us toward the music. And the music tells
us plenty.